Champion of film as art pushed boundaries

Date: December 05 2012

Albie Thoms was a key figure in the history of Australian film, and a general in the pitched battle in the 1970s to create an authentic Australian cinema.

There was an ache in young Australians like Thoms in the early '60s to create their own cinema, fired up by the French New Wave, the British Sight & Sound magazine, the US underground cinema, and, crucially, a plain demand for a cultural identity not sculpted by the BBC and Hollywood. Thoms, who had studied arts at the University of Sydney, felt the angst deeply and quickly proceeded with his friends in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op to galvanise action.

Never bowing to overtly conventional cinema, this modest, knowledgeable and catalytic artist absorbed the history of the avant garde in Europe and became a lifelong avant gardist himself, with a uniquely Australian taste.

When Robert Hughes died recently, it heralded the beginning of the curtain call of an extraordinary generation. Thoms was right in it but, where Hughes was a B-52 bomber, Thoms was a stealth fighter. Not since the Angry Penguins in the '40s and the Heide Circle including Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker cut a controversial swathe in culture has there been an impact like that of Hughes, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Richard Neville, Jenny Kee, Louise Ferrier, Martin Sharp, Thoms, Brett Whiteley, Robert Whitaker and more. The difference is, this surge went international.

While some became certified international media celebrities, Thoms explored the avant garde hot spots of Europe and the US, quietly promoting Australian artists as he went, absorbing the '60s cultural convulsions.

Before funding was provided to some filmmakers by state and federal government, Thoms and his mates, like Bruce Beresford, Garry Shead, Aggy Read, David Perry and others, grabbed 16-millimetre cameras, trekked into the landscape and aggressively started filming. The critic Charles Higham immediately praised the first films. This resulted in an uncensored Australian cinema in aesthetic and moral synchronisation with a worldwide ''underground'' film movement.

The assassination of President Kennedy and the Vietnam War radicalised youth around the world and Thoms was no exception. Cultural and social ''liberation'' movements erupted as Thoms and friends' movie cameras whirred in Sydney. It was a visceral and novel kick to see one's own city on screen. With titles like The Spurt of Blood (Thoms, Perry, 1965), Boobs A Lot (Read, 1968), A Sketch on Abigayl's Belly (Perry, 1968), Bluto (Thoms, 1967), Ding a Ding Day (Shead, 1961-66) and Blunderball (Thoms, 1966), a youth oriented, all-Aussie film culture sprouted.

By 1965, Thoms had started the UBU film group with Perry to consciously make avant garde or ''underground'' movies. Scores of films were created almost by spontaneous combustion, promoted by Thoms and his UBU cohorts Read, John Clark and Perry. For Thoms, the nascent film industry split into the ''artistic'' types and the ''commercial'' types. By 1968, the battle for an Australian cinema had become vitriolic with, for example, Garry Shead drawing a cartoon in UBUNews of Dr H.C. ''Nugget'' Coombs, the then chairman of the Arts Council, sitting on a lavatory reaching for toilet paper saying: ''This is the only roll of film I need.''

Thoms was firmly on the side of ''art'' and was open-minded about what it could be. Barry Humphries later split the difference and satirised it by vomiting off the Eiffel Tower in Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974).

Surfing his generation's zeitgeist, Thoms maintained tough anti-establishment standards and promoted radicalism in film in style and content. He was attacked in Amsterdam by an outraged man as he defended nude women, assistants to performance artist Otto Muehl. Muehl's films were banned worldwide. Thoms recognised early on that great art often had art as its subject, and he switched this theory to film. An early effort in 1963 was made with Bruce Beresford: It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain, starring Greer and shot by Mike Molloy, who went on to work for Stanley Kubrick.

Thoms was a director who could happily juggle the study of fascism, art, experimental cinema, Sydney and the kitchen sink in his first major feature, Marinetti, 1969. This film demanded effort on the part of the viewer like all innovative work and may be considered a masterpiece of Australian experimental cinema.

This was no mean feat since such films are often mocked and marginalised and require an iron will to make, which Thoms had, despite his affable, gentle manner.

Then Thoms could pivot and baffle his followers and direct Skippy the Bush Kangaroo episodes. He relished the story of Frank Thring on the set looking at Skippy struggling in a potato sack. ''If that's the star's friggin' dressing room, what's mine going to be like?'' Thring asked.

Quintessentially of his time, Thoms jumped into the shallow and deep ends of the '60s pool. He could quote Johnny O'Keefe or the French playwright Antonin Artaud.

In 1978, Wild and Woolley published his book Polemics For A New Cinema (subtitled Writings to Stimulate New Approaches to Film), a landmark survey of the avant garde world cinema, and the only book which has a chapter both on the veteran Dad and Dave director Ken G. Hall and Muehl, the aforementioned Austrian film maker who successfully raised the bar on unspeakable obscenity, while (Thoms noted) Hall was fostering The Bobby Limb Show. This is the kind of irony Thoms relished and, like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and other Cahiers du Cinema critics, he became a film theorist turned director.

His innovative feature films, like Marinetti and Palm Beach were, unsurprisingly, met with quizzical reactions but the relentless integrity was the point. They remain priceless celluloid artifacts of an era.

His later television films on Sydney, Donald Bradman, surfing and Johnny O'Keefe exposed his enduring passion for Australiana. He had a wide-ranging career in and after the turbulent '60s and '70s including in theatre, television, film and as an arts and film curator and writer.

After 23 films as a director, his initial passion for the medium never left him. In 1971, he joined his close friend Martin Sharp in work on the legendary Yellow House with many artists including George Gittoes and Peter Kingston. This was a radical multimedia environment, a comfortable venue for Thoms. He collected Sharp's work with the eye of the connoisseur.

Towards the end, Thoms was as engaged as ever on issues of the day, art and film history, able to send thoughtful emails about Marinetti: ''But don't confuse the Marinetti who supported Mussolini with the Marinetti who helped invent modernism. I know they're the same person but the ideas are so contradictory, it's impossible to reconcile them. Do we reject the good ideas because the guy who had them turned out to be an idiot? I don't know!''

Thoms's early influence Artaud wrote: ''Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.'' Thoms heroically ignored this advice, and without him, we would not have the modern Australian film culture we do.

Albie Thoms had a deep and enduring relationship with distinguished art educator Linda Slutzkin until she died in 2005 and is survived by their children Lara and Tommy. Subsequently, his companion was Louise Ferrier, a catalytic figure herself from the initial Sydney and London days.

A celebration of Albie Thoms's life and the launch of his memoir, My Generation, will be held at 5.30pm on December 17 at Paddington Town Hall.

Philippe Mora

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